The Road From Karakol

Combine partial nudity and breathtaking landscapes and you’ve got a recipe for a pretty good movie; throw in world-class alpinist Kyle Dempster, a bicycle and the Kyrgyzstan wilderness, well, then you get an unexpected and touching adventure film. Dempster set out in 2011 for a six-week trip through the Central Asian country, armed with a bicycle for transportation and a bag of climbing gear for soloing unclimbed alpine rock and mixed routes. He recorded the journey using a GoPro camera and a point-and-shoot. When he returned, his sponsors at Outdoor Research connected him with filmmakers Fitz Cahall and Austin Siadak, who turned the footage into an award-winning piece, The Road from Karakol, that’s raw, funny and insightful. “Real adventure is not polished”, Dempster narrates. “It’s not the result of some marketing budget. There’s no hashtag for it. It burns brightest on the map’s edges, but it exists in all of us. It exists at the intersection of imagination and the ridiculous. You have to have faith. It will find you there.”

In 2011, Jimmy Chin climbed one of the hardest peaks in the world, Shark's Fin on Mount Meru. What's more impressive is that he filmed the adventure, then turned it into a documentary that just won big at Sundance.